Press Releases 36

Getty Images Appoints Craig Peters to Lead New Footage and Multimedia Division

In a move to accelerate the growth of its market leading stock and archival footage business, Getty Images has announced that Craig Peters has been appointed as vice president of the company's newly created Footage and Multimedia division. As the head of footage and multimedia, Peters will be responsible for growing footage collections, attracting new customers, driving the development of a new web site and advancing technological improvements, along with developing new business models and improving the overall customer experience.

"Delivering the very best content, online experience and customer service to our customers remains our top priority," said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. "Our market-leading collections, together with those of our many footage partners, are being coupled with the editorial video offerings from WireImage to provide our existing and new customers with all their footage needs. Craig understands how businesses can help unleash creativity and innovation, and his experience in leading teams and implementing strategic partnerships makes him the perfect choice for leading the next phase of growth in our recently enlarged footage business."

Peters joins Getty Images following the recent acquisition of WireImage parent company MediaVast, where he served as senior vice president of new media and strategic development. His responsibilities included general management of the company's worldwide video and mobile businesses as well as identifying, evaluating and structuring key strategic relationships. He will be based in Los Angeles and will report to Nick Evans-Lombe, senior vice president of Imagery and Services.

In 2005, Peters was awarded an Emmy by the National Television Academy for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Enhancement of Original Television Content. Prior to joining MediaVast, Peters led business development for FOX Sports Interactive, led new media strategy and business development for the PGA Tour, and spent over four years at Eastman Kodak Company. Peters has implemented major domestic and international partnerships with leading companies in Internet, mobile, satellite radio and other developing media markets. He received his Masters in Business Administration from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and an undergraduate degree in finance from The Ohio State University.

"Through partnerships with leading content companies and development of wholly-owned content, Getty Images offers an incredible breadth of footage to meet customer needs regardless of project type or size. The acquisition of WireImage further expands this offering, creating an unbeatable combination of depth and ease of use," said Peters. "I look forward to continuing to build Getty Images' footage collections, introducing new technologies and products, and working with our customers to efficiently and cost-effectively produce truly world-class projects."

In creating the footage and multimedia division, Getty Images is devoting fresh resources to one of the most dynamic areas of its business. As customers continue the transition to an all-digital workflow, Getty Images has just completed a conversion to a 100% digital ingestion and distribution system, increasing the company's weekly footage intake capability by 400 percent. With dedicated sales, marketing and technology resources, the new division will roll out additional back-end enhancements and customer-facing initiatives in the coming months.

As the shift to digital makes footage and multimedia workflows even faster, Getty Images offers clients all the services they need to deliver on time, under budget and with the proper clearances necessary for their projects.

This includes the Rights and Clearance Services team, which determines what properties and personalities have protectable rights and provides customers indemnification for all clearance work and licensing agreements. This team leverages relationships with celebrity publicists, film and television studios, music companies and others to secure footage usage rights for an array of clients including several Fortune 500 companies.

Getty Images is capitalizing on the worldwide opportunity presented by the exponential growth of multimedia content for online and mobile platforms.Leveraging its comprehensive editorial photography to new and existing partners, the company currently offers mobile device applications, content licensing to media partners and device manufacturers, and information service applications to carriers and recently added WireImage's editorial footage services to its range of services.

Seamless Photo Workflow Topic At CEPIC Conference

For the first time in its 13 years long history, the CEPIC Congress 2007 (taking place in Florence, Italy from 6 to 10 June) will be hosting the first ever international Conference on Photo Metadata with the participation of all players in the metadata field, from camera producers to photographers.

Under the theme "Working Towards A Seamless Photo Workflow" this will be an independent and external 1st international Photo Metadata Conference that will take place the full day of 7 June, organized by IPTC and IFRA, and sponsored by Adobe Systems Inc.

CEPIC has worked closely with both IPTC and IFRA for some years on several issues that affect the picture industry at large. Since 2005 Cepic has been a member of IPTC and works within a newly formed photo metadata group of IPTC to update the standard of the information that accompanies digital pictures.

For the first time ever the camera producer will speak about photo metadata problems together with photographers, picture agencies and software producers. Canon and Hasselblad will be among the speakers together with some other big companies in the picture business like Adobe, Apple, Fotoware and Microsoft to discuss how to improve the interoperability of photo metadata.

"Photographers, editors, image buyers and others leaders in the photo industry will be able to jointly discuss better ways to describe photos and related rights and permissions information, and will learn how crucial data generated by cameras can improve the editing and long-term resale of images" - says Alan Smith, president of Cepic.

Among other Cepic seminars and workshops will be: User Generated Content or Microstock, new forms of copyright, a legal seminar titled "Can Your Copyright be stolen - legally ?", keywording, and an update on the American Market.

The stealing of pictures on Internet is growing and only cooperation between all in the picture business can make it possible to create a way to effectively fight against misuse of copyright protected pictures.

Last Year the Cepic Congress had 750 delegates from 52 countries all over the world. The conference is the world leading conference of its kind. More than 800 participants are expected to be at the Cepic Congress center in the middle of Florence in June. Over 100 agencies over the world are exhibiting 2007. More information on www.cepic.org.

a21 Enters Mobile Space

SuperStock, a subsidiary company of a21, Inc. has teamed with MyNuMo, one of the leading user-generated mobile content networks, to offer the 203 million U.S. cell phone users a library of professional photography images to create unique, personalized mobile wallpaper.

MyNuMo will incorporate a SuperStock image library into a resource for its Web 2.0 Image Editor, giving community members access to top-of-the-line professional photography for their personal and professional creative use. In addition, SuperStock images will be available for purchase and download as wallpapers on all major U.S. wireless carriers, including Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and Dobson.

"This tool extends the boundaries of creative expression through mobile phones," says John Ferguson, CEO of a21. "We are giving cell phone users nationwide a way to create personalized products and build on the library of images that can either be personally enjoyed or distributed to a global audience."

MyNuMo's mash-up capabilities take wallpaper downloading to the next level by enabling users to use the images as a medium for articulating creative expressions. Stock images will be available as is, as well as in the tool for mash-ups by the creative members in the U.S.A. The technology gives consumers the tools to upload images and video clips for sale and distribution, and feature personal mobile content on personal blogs, Web sites, and other social networking Web sites.

In addition, mobile phone users can purchase images from MyNuMo's innovative Web site, which automatically detects their mobile phone model, and allows easy wireless translation of the image from the image library to a phone's photo gallery. This automatic image trans-coding ensures that every SuperStock image is adapted to optimal image quality on the thousands of handsets MyNuMo supports.

"Incorporating these images into our Image Editor provides a resource to our creative community that will result in some exciting mash-ups," says William Volk, CEO of MyNuMo. "MyNuMo's goal is to give creative people access to the multimillion-dollar mobile market. SuperStock's high quality images are a terrific complement to this mission, and we hope to greatly benefit our artistic members."

Ferguson concluded, "We are excited to launch this mobile image library for consumers, and look forward to a long relationship with MyNuMo as we explore additional opportunities to work together."

The Image Works To Distribute Selections Of George Eastman House Photography Collection

The Image Works has entered into an agreement to distribute select images from The George Eastman House photography collection. The Eastman House is the world's oldest photography museum and opened to the public in 1949. Its comprehensive collection covers photography from its birth to current events. The Image Works will be focusing on the historical aspects of the George Eastman archive - both color and b/w.

The George Eastman House photography collection includes more than 400,000 photographic prints, transparencies and negatives dating from the invention of photography to the present day. The collection represents the work of more than 14,000 photographers including all the major figures in the history of the medium. The scope of the collection includes every photographic process and printing medium employed in the history of photography. The collection includes one of the largest collections of daguerreotypes in the world, major collections of early British and French photographers and important work by many of the great names in the field.

The Image Works intends to gradually and selectively add material from the Eastman House photography collection to its archives over the next 6-10 months. "We are very delighted to add this prestigious collection to our archives," says Mark Antman, president of The Image Works. "We feel there is enormous untapped potential for the vintage and archive imagery that has been so carefully assembled by George Eastman House."

Corbis Helps Hallmark With Rights Clearance

Corbis has announced that it is working with Hallmark Cards, Inc. to continue to make the company's new product development efforts a reality.

Corbis has been working closely with Hallmark to handle the talent rights acquisition and music clearances for Hallmark's line of sound cards which feature CD-quality recordings of original music and sound clips by the original artists and actors who recorded them.

The collection now features more than 250 cards and more than 100 original music artists including Willie Nelson, the Rolling Stones, Tim McGraw, Smash Mouth and Wang Chung, as well as dialogue and theme songs from popular movies and TV shows such as "Napoleon Dynamite," "I Love Lucy" and "Happy Days."

"Corbis is a perfect fit for this job," said Teddi Hernandez, licensing director for Hallmark. "They understand our creative vision and have the Hollywood and global entertainment industry connections, as well as rights and music clearance experience to deliver the content. Corbis helps us navigate unfamiliar waters, avoid roadblocks and unnecessary risks."

Hallmark approached Corbis with their creative idea soon after the "Say It With Music" collection of cards was launched. This was followed by the expansion of sound cards to movies and popular television shows. Record labels, as well as movie studios and media companies, were eager to participate as they recognized the opportunity for new revenue.

"Hallmark has had foresight in recognizing that they could harness digital music and movie and TV clips to drive new product innovation," said David Reeder, Vice President, Branded Content Solutions, Corbis. "We have been negotiating with dozens of content providers to license content that resonates with Hallmark's customers and are managing the complex process of getting the associated talent rights and music clearances."

Corbis also helped support the advertising campaign for the new line of cards, clearing personality, imagery, video footage and music rights for print advertisements, direct mail, TV commercials and online promotional use.

The Hallmark cards cover a range of sending situations including birthday, thinking of you, friendship, love, anniversary, encouragement, support, new baby, congratulations and cope as well as popular holidays. The sound clips featured in the cards have multigenerational appeal. The high sound quality from the cards' internal speaker is designed to be played again and again. The cards are priced at $4.99 each.

Image Source Expands Regional Offices

Image Source has moved three offices to new spaces in New York's Soho, the Belgian Quarter of Cologne and LA's Hollywood. This is the result of continued investment and expansion in creative content and staff. The New York office was the first wholly owned Image Source office outside Europe and celebrated only its second birthday in March 2007. The Los Angeles office is only six months old.

"Our international offices have grown so much in the last 12 months that, to put it simply, we had run out of space", said Christina Vaughan, Image Source's Founder and Chief Executive Officer. "We have doubled the number of staff and are producing twice as many new images, a phenomenal achievement for an independent library which is still relatively young."

The extra office space will allow Image Source's teams to further expand and still remain within the creative hotspots of central Manhattan, Cologne and, of course, Hollywood. Christina Vaughan added: "As a genuine leader in the production of high value, high end images, it is important for us to be based within the creative centres of the world and have the space and freedom to stretch our creative minds. These new offices allow us to do that, as well as giving us plenty of space to grow into."

IMAGES24 based in Cape Town, South Africa, licenses rights to images from a wide range of publications in the Media24 stable of magazines such as Fair Lady, Sarie, True Love, Visi, Drum, You, Huigenoot, Woman's Value and Home. The company also has shots from renowned figures like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu & Charlize Theron all of which can be found at www.images24.co.za.

Rhianne van der Linde, Account Manager at IMAGES24, says "We are very proud of our collections, especially some of our iconic imagery of Nelson Mandela. He is such an inspiration to people in South Africa and around the world that it's great to have hundreds of amazing photographs of him, documenting so many aspects of his public life and the remarkable contribution he has made to the South African political landscape."

Other editorial images are also available in the fields of News and Sport, including current South African events, breaking news & celebrity exclusives. Further Entertainment, Personalities and Archive categories contain a host of images featuring modern day legends and also covering the "greatest" moments in South African history.

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.

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